Cape Fear Recap: Problem Child

Cape Fear
Faith
Season 1 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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The one crucial difference between the 1962 Cape Fear and the 1991 Cape Fear is the Bowden family in the latter is wildly dysfunctional, which makes them more vulnerable to Max Cady’s slow-burn revenge scheme. There’s friction between the defense lawyer Sam (Nick Nolte) and his wife, Leigh (Jessica Lange), rooted in Sam’s past infidelity and his current flirtations with a young courthouse clerk who idolizes him. Their anger and mistrust trickles down to their daughter, Danielle (Juliette Lewis), who resents them both and acts out like 15-year-old might, which is especially dangerous given her combination of sexual curiosity and schoolgirl naïvety. These are the pressure points that Cady manipulates throughout the course of the film, but even in the notorious scene where Cady pretends to be Danielle’s new drama teacher, when he’s an obvious threat to her, her actions are explicable in the moment. And even then, she winds up running out of the building.

By contrast, the Bowdens act like complete numbskulls in this episode of Cape Fear because the plot requires them to do so. They are like the classic doomed heroine in a slasher film, all running up the stairs at once.

At this point, they should all know that Cady means the entire family harm, and they should also know that his daughter (or alleged daughter) Nevaeh, who’s been inserting herself into the lives of both the Bowden children, has sinister intentions. Though Cady has made some gestures towards helping the Bowdens, like his behind-the-scenes effort to get one of Anna’s death-row clients exonerated last week, Tom and Anna should not be so dumb as to ignore his ulterior motives. As with the ’91 film, they obviously did something ethically wrong in negotiating a bad plea deal for Cady in his original trial, and they know that he knows it, too. To act like they’re on good terms should be just theater on everybody’s part here. After all, the first episode of the series ends with Max in the Bowdens’ backyard, presiding over the moment when a drugged-out Zack comes stumbling home with a severed toe. Not an ordinary evening!

The revelation that closed last week’s episode should have altered this week’s significantly. After digging around a bit, Anna’s loyal co-worker Ray, an ex-con she helped free from prison, gives her the information that Nevaeh, the girl who’s been manipulating both her children, is presumed to be Cady’s daughter, the product of a relationship that Cady had with Faith Valentine (Martha Millan) while he was incarcerated. Knowing this information should be an advantage for Anna, who is rightfully freaked out that Nevaeh seems to be actively manipulating both her children, but her decision to confront Neveah directly has squandered whatever leverage she might have had. Ray advises Anna to let the police handle the situation, which confirms him as the most rational character on the show and thus the only threat that Cady seems to recognize. 

Still, it does square with Anna’s pugnacious nature that she would opt to get in Nevaeh’s face rather than defuse the threat more subtly. In a callback to the famous ’91 Cape Fear scene where Robert De Niro’s Cady smokes a cigar and laughs through the woeful 1990 John Ritter comedy Problem Child, Nevaeh cracks open a stinky can of sardines and bellows through the climax of Babe: Pig in the City. (Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, by the way! Why would it be playing at what appears to be a single-screen repertory house in Savannah if it were not a beloved cult classic from the director of the Mad Max movies?) After the movie is over, Anna tries briefly to appeal to Nevaeh as the fellow daughter of a problematic father, but that tactic falls flat immediately. Nevaeh is so confident she has the upper hand that she taunts Anna, claiming her husband hates her and informing her that Natalie, her perfect daughter, now has a nipple ring.

What happens next is a bit of a narrative cheat, as it appears on video like Anna pushes Nevaeh into oncoming traffic. It’s semi-believable that someone might have taped their confrontation and posted it on social media, which makes Anna look terrible to the public and the police, who quickly lose interest in investigating Nevaeh on the Bowdens’ behalf. But the two Cape Fear movies both devote a lot of time to Cady leveraging the law to his advantage, shrewdly manipulating the police into making it seem like the Bowdens are harassing him, not the other way around. But Nevaeh doesn’t plan to get hit by a car so she can draw sympathy from the public, the police, and the Bowden children. She taunts her way back into the street and what happens happens.

While it’s plausible that Zack is too far gone to see Nevaeh for who she really is — the mesmeric religious cult that binds Cady and Nevaeh seems to have afflicted Zack as well — Cape Fear really stretches credulity on Natalie and Tom’s behavior this episode. It is entirely reasonable for Natalie to question her mom even more forcefully on what she and Tom did to Cady back in the day, but she should also be smart enough to recognize that her new friend “Amber” hasn’t been straight with her, either, and that the alleged daughter of the ex-con stalking her parents might not have her well-being at heart. The daughters in the two Cape Fear movies are younger and more naive than Natalie is here — Lori Martin in the ’62 version is basically an unreflective child, and Juliette Lewis in the ’91 version is on the razor’s edge of pubescence — but she’s being asked to behave as if she has no common sense whatsoever.

On the other hand, her stepdad Tom is a middle-aged man and he’s not faring any better. The current hiccup for Tom at work is that his wealthy client Catherine (Wynn Everett), a widow up on murder charges, can read his distraction over Lexi, the attorney he’s not quite sleeping with, and she wants Lexi off the case. But Lexi does not take the dismissal lightly, threatening to refer Tom to human resources for all the “flirting and gaslighting and microdosing” he’s been doing with a subordinate in the office. That puts Tom in an awkward spot to be sure, but the episode would have us believe that he’d turn to Max Cady in his hour of need. While it’s true that the show has been establishing Tom and Cady as drinking buddies of sorts for a while now, there’s enough history between them to prevent Tom from trusting him as a confidant. When their evening ends with Tom leaving an ill-advised drunk-dial message on Lexi’s cell phone, that again feels like Cape Fear is asking too much from its viewers.

To the extent that Cape Fear gets away with narrative shortcuts and plausibility issues, it helps that these recent episodes have kept their foot on the gas. One obvious problem with expanding a two-hour movie (or movies, in this case) into a 10-episode limited series is the risk of slackened tension, but this show just gets pulpier by the hour. Even if you’re going nowhere, you always want to be going nowhere fast.

Weeping Willows

• Problem Child came out a year before Cape Fear from the same studio, Universal Pictures, so it makes some sense that the Bowdens would ignore the reviews and catch a local matinee of this hit family comedy. A theater that’s showing Babe: Pig in the City with suggestive “Coming Soon” posters for Crime of the Century and Guilty as Hell? We’re in Movieland.

• Cady’s association with some kind of religious cult suggests that Navaeh, despite insisting to Anna that she makes her own choices, has fallen under her father’s sway and shouldn’t necessarily be held responsible for actions like, say, bludgeoning her mother with the weird totem that Zack had been keeping in the house. 

• Good to see Paul Schneider in the fold as Grayson, the cop who looks into Nevaeh. Schneider’s abbreviated stint on Parks and Recreation, an excellent sitcom that couldn’t find much to do with him, seemed to have damaged his reputation unnecessarily. He’s terrific in the early David Gordon Green romance All the Real Girls and as Dick Liddil in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and slides nicely into character roles like this one.

• Though the equivalent of the Illeana Douglas character in the ’91 Cape Fear would appear to be Lexi, the young co-worker that flirts with Tom, it’s really seeming like Tabitha, the reporter gassing up Cady for being “marketable,” is a more obvious candidate to meet the same grisly fate. Stay tuned on that.

• Juliette Lewis continues to be a wild card in this Cape Fear, playing a character with the power to repulse, terrify, and seduce Cady all at the same time. It’s unclear what her role will be, but it’s fun to have her lurking out in the brush.

• There’s enough interest in the Bowden/Cady conflict that clips keep circulating online — of Natalie sunbathing, of Natalie confronting a true-crime podcaster, of Anne pushing Nevaeh into the street — but how much this footage has broken containment is a mystery. 

• The scene where Anna catches Zack staring blankly at the open fridge terrifies her enough to make her realize that Faith isn’t concerned with Nevaeh so much as she is afraid of her. That connects with both Anna’s worries over Zack and the scenes where Byron French’s mom was trying to signal concerns over her own son’s behavior. They all seem connected at this point.